Dairy Dip Days

From Girl To Country, a memoir in progress

“Could I get one of them junior dip top cones? Vanilla ice cream with chocolate and…let me see, a root beer float?” The woman’s face looms at the Dairy Dip window. She pushes a five dollar bill across the counter. I make change and she drops the coins in the tip jar. When she steps back to wait for her order, I lean out the window to catch a breeze. August in Nashville, and it has to be nearly a hundred degrees out there. Inside the Dairy Dip, it feels a good twenty degrees hotter.

Back in spring 2000, I helped my friend Claire Mullally in her effort to refurbish this old ice cream place on Charlotte Avenue. Claire is an attorney, brimming with East Coast energy and attention to detail. She’s done a soft serve business seminar at Ice Cream University; sought out the best beef for her burgers and authentic Belgian recipes for the french fries. The newly-painted pink, red and mint green exterior of Bobbie’s Dairy Dip is a nostalgic contrast to neighboring commercial chains Krystal and Burger King. I remember stopping at the original Dairy Dip when Hazel and I visited Nashville together from New York City and how captivated we’d been, thinking “Wow —this is America!” I’m proud of Claire and her vision, and thought it would be more fun to help out here than go back to temping in an office.

Fun is probably the wrong word for hours of sweating, scooping and slinging burgers and fries alongside surly teenage co-workers. I commiserate and laugh with Juan the grill cook, a graceful man about my age who sends his earnings back home to his wife and children in Mexico.

I was the teenager scooping ice cream twenty summers ago at the Haagen Dasz on Christopher Street in Manhattan. My artist life was just beginning but, as has happened a few times in my life, I got distracted by love—that year it was the manager of a British punk band. He’s long gone; at forty-one I’m still an artist and maybe I like the carefree nature of this type of job as respite from adult responsibilities. When I tie my apron on each day here in Nashville, there’s not that lure of temporary jobs in academia, real estate or the world of business that say “why be only a temp? Give up those foolish music dreams and come work for us…FOREVER.” Not that I don’t have musician friends who’ve managed to hold down steady jobs and keep their dreams alive. But that kind of practicality has never suited me.

Another good thing about the Dairy Dip: ice cream makes people happy. Children’s eyes shine, adults’ do too. Businessmen with their brick-like cellphones, sweating in dress shirts and voluminous khaki trousers, turn into beatific little boys when they grip a cone and turn their heads sideways to lap up the drips: “Mmm, good!” they say, and I can almost forget they’re probably Republicans.

I’m still getting settled in Nashville. Anyone I know in this town eventually pulls up in a car for an ice cream or burger at the Dairy Dip. Unlike temping at Sony in NYC, where I’d hid in back of the elevator to avoid running into music biz people I knew, I’m glad to have this Charlotte Avenue window onto what begins to take shape in my mind as a community: guitar players, fellow songwriters, music publishers—even if they see me with hamburger grease and chocolate ice cream smeared across my front.

Jim Herrington took these pics. I thought they looked like I was too happy serving ice cream so wouldn’t make good music promo shots!

As the weather turns cooler and the crowds die down, Claire and her husband, singer/songwriter Greg Trooper, hit on the idea of putting on live music in the parking lot. A P.A. is set up next to the picnic tables for John Prine’s birthday. Prine has the dream singer songwriter career: love and respect from fans and fellow musicians over his decades of crafting classic songs, for the simple act of being himself onstage and in the studio. He’s kind of a patron saint of Nashville.  The summer humidity is gone and the air is full of fall energy. Folks grab burgers and Cokes and start cranking out cover songs. I come from behind the counter in my apron and someone hands me a guitar.

“I’ll be right back!” I shout to my teenage coworker, who is struggling to fill orders alone. I play “Cynically Yours,” a song I’d started writing as a temp at CBS Legal Department, finished as a temp at Vanderbilt Medical Center and recorded for my most recent album The Sugar Tree. Beneath the big yellow Krystal sign shining down from next door, I play my song and John Prine laughs and cheers. “That’s a good song right there,” he says. I feel like he’s blessed me.

Another night, I ask the guys if they know Wreckless Eric’s “Whole Wide World.” “It’s only got two chords,” I say. Everyone sort of knows it— punk and new wave songs are a secret handshake for a certain type of musician drawn to Nashville. That place where the wit and simplicity of classic country intersects with the early rock and roll attributes of punk is a good, if slightly exclusive, place to be— Bill Lloyd, Steve Allen from Tulsa via L.A. power pop outfit 20/20; Dave Jacques who plays bass with Prine—we chug through the first two verses before things kick into higher gear for the chorus.

We mess up the skipped beat in the chorus but redeem ourselves and end on a celebratory note. The song—romantic and rogue—has the power to draw people together. I don’t realize when I start sticking it into my set any time it feels like I could use a friend just where that power will lead.

Later in the evening after locking up the Dairy Dip, I pedal my bike a few blocks over to the sweet little Craftsman cottage I’ve been renting on Nevada Avenue, thinking how living in Nashville is going to be alright.

A few days later, the landlord tells me they need to sell the house.